A Civil War Historian Reacts - Did the CONFEDERACY Have BETTER GENERALS? (Checkmate Lincolnites) - 2

welcome back everybody to part two of my reaction to and shave films uh talking about whether or not the confederacy had better generals if you didn't see part one of my reaction or if you want to see the original content without my commentary both links are in the description below i am on my way to boston and to maine tomorrow morning with the family first family vacation in five years so we are super excited about that i will be shooting a limited amount of content for the channel while we are there in particular on going to joshua lawrence chamberlain's house and his grave in brunswick maine i also probably shoot some video at places like plymouth colony where they have a kind of a living history thing going on similar to what they have down in williamsburg beyond that i don't know because i've done a lot of content in boston already but we'll see so we're going to dive into this overwhelming majority of you say you like this format with the frame so once again andrea thank you for doing that for us we appreciate that and uh i like it a lot i'm very pleased with it and uh wasn't even something i asked uh asked andrea to do he just reached out to me and sent it and i'll think of something probably send him some money or something just to say thank you since we are using it for the channel but let's go ahead and dive into part two i do want to offer one bit of uh response to something several of you mentioned about yesterday's video and i would 100 agree with you on this uh several of you pointed out the fact that though this is a video talking about who had the better generals a lot of part one yesterday a lot of his time was spent talking about nathan bedford forest activity after the war uh kind of painting his character which i don't disagree with what he talked about after the war nathan bedford forest was definitely involved in the clan definitely some things there about his character that are not to be praised at all but it has nothing to do with whether or not he was a good general during the war it's important for us to separa if we're going to talk about and judge a person's performance as a general we can't do that by talking about what they did after the war it has nothing to do with whether or not they were a good general it has a lot to do with their character as human beings but not whether or not they were a great general so i think we need to separate the two and i'll be much more careful about watching for that in this second episode so let's dive in now we'll grant you this man it is also entirely possible that forest did have a genuine change of heart i'm not discounting that a lot of people at the time thought so in fact when a lot of forests former comrades and grey heard about this speech they [ __ ] a brick one confederate veterans group went so far as to publish this in their local paper clean darts no action unworthy of a southern gentleman i speak of the address delivered before a black and tan audience by general nathan bedford forrest with what a glow of enthusiasm and thrill of pride have i not perused the campaigns of general forests cavalry their heroic deeds their sufferings and their successes under the leadership of one whom i always considered my poor judgment second only to our immortal hampton and now tomorrow all the luster attached to his name his brain is turned by the civilities of a mulatto wench who presented him with a bouquet of roses what can his object be ah general forest so isn't it interesting to look at this and see a person being disgusted by behavior that i personally would applaud from general forest if he indeed has had a change of heart and whether he's had a change of heart or not the fact is he did something that many people in the south he knew would object to and he knew would respond to this way so it took some guts for him to do that i'm not praising the man there's a lot of pretty terrible stuff in his character especially post-war but you have to give him credit for at least taking this step which was a lot further than a lot of people were willing to go and how disgusting is it that this is the response to that that people are ashamed of him for doing something that i would consider to be a noble step in the right direction little billy i won't lie to you that's really quite vile yeah can we go back to talking about military history now i found it to be much more comfortable and safe and which is what this supposed to be about anyway right one more point listen forrest is unbelievably over hyped but he was a competent general he was also a mass murdering terrorist piece of [ __ ] and should be remembered as such in my opinion just about every positive mention of his generalship should be accompanied by extreme moral condemnation an acknowledgement of the us colored troops he massacred without quarter at fort pillow now i agree with that because if we are going to talk about his military record which is what we're supposed to be talking about then that stuff's fair game and the fort pillow massacre is totally on him those were his troops that murdered black soldiers now we have to remember that the confederacy as a whole had issued a proclamation stating that it was their government policy that black soldiers captured in federal uniform were to be some summarily executed as were white officers in command of those black soldiers that's not a defense of force that's a condemnation as the of the confederacy as a whole now a lot of confederate generals did not follow through on that to their credit but that was government policy but but can't we celebrate his military achievements without glorifying his less savory attributes yeah and we could also celebrate osama bin laden's dexterous use of expedia dot com but that'd be pretty [ __ ] weird wouldn't it you know what i think i think you're compensating for something y'all didn't have a darren brilliance cavalry commander on your side sheridan also you're just trying to knock one of ours down a pig i'll see your nathan bedford forest and raise you colonel benjamin h grierson oh griffin's good grierson had a pretty uh pretty good raid himself grierson solid uh george armstrong custer was a very good cavalry commander during the american civil war we tend to think of him through the lens of little bighorn in 1876 but he was good um you know phil sheridan did a great job with the cavalry late in the war ridiculously clever cavalry raid down the length of mississippi during the vicksburg campaign though the initial purpose of the raid was to cut the railroad east of jackson mississippi grierson went above and beyond the call of duty going from lagrange tennessee to baton rouge louisiana wreaking havoc all the while reerson and his troopers broke up two other railroads destroyed weapons and commissary stores burned storehouses disabled trains and freed slaves all in all they inflicted millions of dollars worth of property damage on mississippi and permanently crippled that state's military usefulness for the rest of the war and it's funny nobody in the south complains about grierson the way that they complain about sherman and he was doing a lot of the same stuff under grant's command and speaking of grant if we're going to talk about i'm sure he'll get to this grant's vicksburg campaign in may of 1863 to me is the most brilliant generalship of the entire american civil war better than anything lee did better than anything jackson did better than anything anybody did they also diverted substantial numbers of confederate cavalry that were badly needed in the defense of vicksburg itself but possibly most impressive of all grierson accomplished all of this at the cost of three men killed and seven wounded contrast that with forests raids sure they were flashy and daring but did they make a huge difference to the outcome of those campaigns i wouldn't say so and to my mind i think you guys only had one strategically minded general who thought of things in terms of the big picture rather than individual maneuvers and battles and he was of course josephine johnston and if you if you read grant's memoirs he speaks very highly of johnston as an officer as a general probably higher than he does of lee so there's some stuff to back this up uh the even the the north's winning general thought johnston was one of their best generals josephine johnston i think he was the only senior confederate general who understood that when you're fighting with limited manpower you need to pick your battles literally very very carefully most other rebel generals thought of war in terms of attacking or defending dots on a map they were very geographic in the way they went about it but johnston understood that when you're outnumbered and outgunned stubbornly holding on to bits of dirt can often be counterproductive maneuver even strategic retreat can be much more beneficial in the long run there is no way to fat with honor that's what george washington did for the entire american revolution was the fallback thing it's what sam houston did during the uh the texas war for independence to finally defeat santa ana they called it the runaway scrape because he kept falling back kept falling back until he got to a place where he had a strategic advantage and he won the battle and won the war yeah that's what jeff davis often said which is exactly why johnston hated him so much and privately talked all sorts of [ __ ] about jackson and lee whereas it must be said our side was full of keenly strategic military minds look no further than george henry thomas the virginian unionist like mead he was deliberate never imperiled the lives of his men unnecessarily but unlike mead he was creative he was adaptable he could always shift his strategy in the chaotic and ever-changing circumstances of warfare now again i'll go back to grant's memoirs because uh that's a source for a lot of this and grant i highly recommend grant's memoirs if you want to get a perspective from one of the leading generals of the war that also attempts very hard to be unbiased grant really goes out of his way to be as even keeled as possible even the people he criticizes he also tries to see things their way and tries to make excuses for them as to why they would have behaved that way and how he could be wrong about his assessment of them so in talking about thomas he praised thomas as an excellent general and remember he put thomas in command of the army that had been commanded by rosecrans after rosecrans uh lost at chickamauga and ran away from the battlefield with two of his three corps commanders he put thomas who was that third corps commander in charge of the army uh and he said of thomas he said that if you were defending a position thomas was your guy but if you were looking to go on the initiative to go on the offensive thomas was not very strong in that area george thomas that is strange i really haven't heard much about this faithless virginian well that's because he was modest to a fault in fact he probably wouldn't want me to even mention him in this video because he never wrote a memoir and he even destroyed his wartime correspondences because he couldn't stand the idea of future generations picking over the events of his life he also faced a lot of discrimination from his northern superiors because of his southern origins and he was often overlooked for promotions and acclimations typical i'm with you there and ever since general thomas has been kind of forgotten about by historians despite the fact that he was a huge badass in a skirmish before the first battle of bull run he actually went toe-to-toe with stonewall jackson and kicked his [ __ ] ass at the disastrous battle at chickamauga when william rosencrantz the union army commander fled the field rosencrans is a character in hamlet rose crans was the commander of the army of uh cumberland thomas remained behind fighting on alone with his men against the whole rebb army badly outnumbered and outflanked he did and this holding action single-handedly saved the army of the cumberland from complete destruction and two months later united states forces would get their revenge at the battle of missionary ridge where thomas and william tecumseh sherman orchestrated a frontal attack on the confederate center that shattered their lines and those lines might i add were entrenched on high ground and then in december 1864 thomas faced off against john bell hood who sucks by the way in the battle sucked as an army commander fantastic division commander and he also you gotta remember by december of 1864 john bell hood uh had lost the use of an arm at gettysburg in july of 63. in september of 63 he loses a leg just below the hip at chickamauga he loses several children who passed away during this time my man had some reasons for not really being with it militarily of nashville and destroyed his army that's not hyperbole he literally destroyed it the army of the tennessee was laid low it's ruined smote upon the mountainside yeah there'd be no more large-scale fighting west of the appalachians for the remainder of the war george thomas never lost a movement or a battle and may very well have been the best general on either side in the entire conflict i disagree that he was the best general on either side i still think that was grant but thomas was one of the best generals in the union army automatic what else this fella do cure cancer though as far as good union generals go there's one person that we haven't talked about yet les migues sherman do it again uncle billy spare me your memes sir besides we've already done an entire episode about him no no no no no green oh boy we're going star wars here sir lord [Music] [Music] are you all right yes i'm i'm fine i just uh just a man a hallucination do you hallucinate often no anyway about ulysses s grant i mean he was just a beast i mean that's the man who saved the union oh so now grant wasn't a drunk and didn't run up a horrific casualty rate amongst his troops forget the lost cause oh currently revisionist history has done to canonize the north and demonize the south all right yeah and agree 100 that the whole painting the picture of grant as this butcher who just hurled his men at the enemy because he knew he had unlimited resources and that's the only reason he won is completely ridiculous grant was a brilliant general he made some mistakes just as all the generals did but uh in terms of strategy he was the best general in the war he was the only one who really understood the big picture in a way that actually made it happen got all the pieces moving in the right direction yes he was an alcoholic but he never drank at a time when something critical was going on uh i'm not excusing his alcoholism but he absolutely could control it when he needed to well that depends on what you mean by a drunk i mean he definitely abused alcohol but whether he was a occasional binge drinker or a you want some uh or a full-fledged alcoholic i mean that's kind of hard to determine yeah binge drinker's probably more likely cheers cheers he also couldn't hold his alcohol if the butcher grant is the best you yankers have to offer then i'm afraid you are in a heap of trouble for there is simply no comparison betwixt the butcher grant and oh mars rather grant was a better general in the words of jubilee shall i compare generally to his successful antagonist may as well compare the great pyramid which creates its majestic proportions of the valley of the nile to a pygmy perched at mount atlas nice one jupiter wonderful use of very specific north african imagery you really showed that butcher grant what's what you keep calling grants a butcher why is that because his general ship contained no spark on military genius his idea of war was to the last degree rude no strategy the mere application of the wings inertia he had none of that quick perception talk about vicksburg he did some strokes he had no conception of war beyond the momentum of numbers such was the man who marshall all the material resources of the north to crush the little army and overcome the consummate scale generally that's a very common and especially eastern theater-centric misconception and it mainly stems from grants battles against lee in 1864 namely the overland campaign and yes to be fair the casualties in that campaign were appallingly high on both sides yep and though we all eventually won your casualties were higher than ours we lost approximately thirty three thousand men killed wounded on missile y'all lost fifty five thousand men killed wounded or missing well we were on the offensive during the overland campaign and attackers do tend to take more casualties than defenders and this is also a time when the war is shifting in terms of how it's fought it's shifting to trench warfare shifting to fixed positions that are going to be heavily defended against frontal assaults and so grant adjusting to that especially since the war was becoming steadily more brutal as tactics slowly transitioned between napoleonic style open field type warfare and kind of pro to world war one deeply entrenched warfare of attrition that was not the sort of campaign that grant was trying to fight by the way he actually wanted to maneuver lee into fighting an old-fashioned open field type of battle where he could bring his superior numbers to bear more effectively but it was lee who decided to entrench so he could better protect richmond and petersburg it had been something he had been threatening to do for a very long time but grant was brimley determined and kept the pressure up until the united states achieved a costly but decisive victory and you have to remember too grant had to keep attacking because his whole strategy was based on basically about a five-pronged attack across the entire front of the war at the same time so you're attacking out of louisiana you're attacking from tennessee at georgia you're attacking down the shenandoah valley you're coming up the peninsula and you're coming down from washington d.c toward richmond he couldn't let up in keeping the pressure on lee because if he let off of lee just because lee dug in lee could have sent reinforcements to one of those other theaters and he couldn't allow that to happen but what about the yankee defeated cold harbor or the turkish shoot slaughter at the battle of the crater yeah i mean those are unsupported attacks were huge mistakes and resulted in a horrendous and completely unnecessary loss of life but it's important to understand that those missteps were the exception of grant's general they were not only the exception they were also i would argue much more on subordinates than on him especially the crater the crater was a good plan and if executed correctly by the men involved especially the division commanders it would have been effective and it might have broken the lines at petersburg but the last minute change uh to take out the african-american soldiers who were trained and ready to go in and replace them with ludley's division was a huge mistake and the same thing with cold harbor from my visit to cold harbor a couple of months ago i was doing a lot of studying of this and i had always been of the mind of blaming grant for that one as well and grant himself in his memoir said that last attack i made at cold harbor is a big mistake and it's something i regret more than anything else in the war but that said the the men who he had placed in command of that assault on june 3rd had not recon ordered the ground they had not planned effectively and they did not fully commit their troops ship not the norm you see grant had a truly national view of the conflict now there's no way to say this without coming across at least a little bit cold blooded but it's a tragic fact the carnage of the overland campaign was necessary to bring the war to a timely conclusion which grant did after less than a year in overall command of the united states forces contrast that with his predecessors in the east like mcclellan or burnside who racked up significantly higher casualties than grant did with significantly less to show for it yeah think about the fact that mcclellan commanded the army of the potomac longer than grant commanded in the east i shouldn't say the arm of the potomac because mcclellan did for a while have overall command as general in chief until halleck was given that position um but yeah i mean mcclellan commanded the army for quite a while did very little with it grant and lincoln had a very specific strategy in virginia at the end of the war to grab lee by the neck and to squeeze and to keep squeezing never giving him a moment's repose never allowing him for a second to even think about going on the offensive mr president if we are to draw troops from the field it will prove difficult to suppress the rebellion in the disloyal states my withdrawal now from the james river would ensure the defeat of sherman general grant i have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hole where you are neither am i willing hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible and as battered as grant's army was lees had suffered far worse losing a full half of its combat strength in the overland campaign alone and while the united states could always augment its forces with fresh troops the confederate states were running out of options as grant himself reflected the rebels have now in their ranks their last man the little boys and old men are guarding prisoners guarding railroad bridges and forming a good number of their garrisons for entrenched positions a man lost by them cannot be replaced they have robbed the cradle and the grave equally to get their present force besides what they lose in frequent battles and skirmishes they are now losing from desertions and other causes at least one regiment per day sounds an awful lot like what i was just saying about overwhelming us with numbers lee wasn't overwhelmed he was out generaled the union had learned from experience that superior numbers and resources don't win wars on their own so what they needed was a general who could effectively utilize those numbers and resources which is exactly what grant did he pinned the army of northern virginia down in richmond and petersburg while sherman ravaged the deep south and closed lee's back door he's right he's absolutely right and this criticism of the fact that grant used the strengths of the north to win the war seems a little ridiculous to me because why wouldn't he use their strengths i mean if you look at it on paper and say wow we've got more of everything of course you should keep the pressure up on an enemy that doesn't have as much of everything that's how you win a war like that you don't let up you don't give them a chance to breathe you as he said keep them pinned down i completely agree joe johnston and p.t borigard who were at that time defending georgia and the carolinas respectively did all they could to keep that trap from swinging shut but lee meanwhile just froze he stayed put and he allowed himself to be obliterated nonsense protecting richmond and our center of government was essential to our survival as a nation okay but while lee was busy defending virginia to the last sherman snuck up behind him and rammed a boot up his ass it was a losing strategy and lee is more culpable than you realize for what shall it profit a man if he gains virginia but loses the whole south yeah for most of the war lee's entire mandate was his beloved virginia he wasn't even appointed general in chief of all confederate armies until february of 65. maybe not officially but lee was massively influential in the confederacy and had been since 1862 and i mean [ __ ] he was the face of the rebellion lee was myopic about defending his home state and multiple times when key positions in the western theater were under dire threat he flat out refused to send any of his troops to help i'll back away from that a little bit because lee did send longstreet's core west after gettysburg to fight at chickamauga so it's not that he always refused it's just in certain situations for example during the gettysburg campaign when uh jeff davis wanted him to send troops to relieve vicksburg he understood that at that point it was too little too late so i'll defend leon that i'll also defend the fact that if we're talking about being myopic and defending virginia the union was equally myopic in wanting to take richmond that was the whole thing on to richmond the whole point of the army of the potomac the whole existence of that army was to take richmond that was their aim the entire war so of course that's what he's trying to defend in mid-1863 when grant was tightening the noose around vicksburg and the rebel army and scots there confederate secretary of war james sudden urged lee to send george pickett's division west lee responded with a refusal of course and it was full of excuses some reasonable others bizarre the adoption of your proposition is hazardous and it becomes a question between virginia and the mississippi the distance and uncertainty of the employment of the troops are unfavorable if you determine to send pickets division to general pemberton i presume it will not reach him until the last of this month if anything is done in that quarter it will be over in that time as the climate in june will force the enemy to retire i think troops ordered from virginia to the mississippi this season would be greatly endangered by the climate and the one time lee did acquiesce to reinforcing the west when he sent long streets court to north georgia and made a key difference in defeating the us army at chickamauga and then the scalawag allowed himself to get elicked by ambrose bonsai of all people pathetic in any event lee was right he was handily outnumbered and he hadn't demand despair well then why did he always get them killed at such an astounding rate if anybody deserves to be called a butcher it's bobby lee moss robert no no he he loved us he never threw our lives away needlessly except he totally did like all the time nope nope nope nope that's your boy grant you're thinking of he didn't care quick about his men he just threw waves of conscripted children to their deaths let's crunch some numbers lee's greatest victory was the battle of chancellorsville his army was about 60 000 strong and suffered nearly 13 000 casualties a net loss of 22 percent his opponent joe hooker had an army 133 000 strong and suffered about 17 000 casualties a net loss of 12 percent the victory though tactically brilliant gained no ground for the confederacy reaped no major strategic benefit and resulted in the death of stonewall jackson i disagree that it reaped no strategic benefit it defeated the army that was in central virginia outside of fredericksburg that's what he was supposed to do and and i get what he's saying about percentages but you're also i'm not going to criticize lee's victory chancellorsville it was brilliant no matter how you look at it he he had an army of less than half he split his army multiple times he won with fewer casualties that's not a good argument to make i don't think one of lee's best generals grant's greatest victory was the siege of vicksburg his army was forty-five thousand strong and suffered three thousand casualties a net loss of seven percent his opponent john pemberton had an army about forty thousand strong and suffered seven thousand casualties dead wounded or missing as well as a staggering 33 000 captured a net loss of effectively 100 the victory secured the union's complete control of the mississippi river and brought about the capture of the nearby state capital of jackson now you can pick and choose battles all you want look at this one battle here's you know if you're gonna make a fair analysis you need to look at every battle it ended rebel resistance in the region exposed the confederacy's soft underbelly of east tennessee and georgia and was a crucial step toward final victory throughout the war in the battles for which reliable statistics exist lee suffered an average killed or wounded casualty rate of 20.2 percent and inflicted an average killed a wounded casualty rate of 15.4 percent and again this is really cherry picking the numbers to make it look favorable to one side you can't look at percentages because the union always had a massively larger force of course they lost a smaller percentage show me the raw numbers that's the only thing i'd be concerned about in a situation like this in total 121 000 of the men under his command were killed and wounded the highest of any general in the civil war grant on the other hand suffered an average killed or wounded casualty rate of 18.1 percent and inflicted an average killed a wounded casualty rate of 20.7 percent in total 94 000 of the men under his command were killed and wounded 23 000 in the western theater and 71 000 in the east look lee was a good general sure i ventured to say he did a better job leading the army of northern virginia than i would have done i'm not trying to unduly demonize him here or exaggerate his faults but a military genius the greatest field commander in american history no i agree that i don't think lee is as great as most people give him credit for but i'm not going to go so far as to say he was just meh he was okay he was a very good general and he did really well with what he had i do think he's over hyped a bit and i think grant's under hyped a little bit that's a fairy tale born from more than a century of creepy pseudo-religious deification in many ways the comparison between grant and lee tells us all we need to know about why the war went the way it did lee led with the power of personality he thought that war should be grand sweeping and heroic he loved dramatic charges and clever tactical sights of hand he considered logistics to be an annoyance rather than an opportunity which is why confederate military history is full of flashy daring do but pretty shorts on substantial operational success grant meanwhile was all stubbornness and pragmatism war was not a game to him there was nothing poetic about it like his buddy sherman he believed that to wage war meant to bring it to a favorable conclusion as quickly as possible and to achieve victory he used every tool available to him deception diversion maneuver relentless attack and dogged defense and never lost sight of the big picture battles didn't really matter that much in of themselves they were just stepping stones toward the distant goal of ultimate victory and that's why for the most part the confederacy did not have better generals you were obsessing over tactics while we were planning strategies you thought small we thought big that's why we won look at you smugly conducted military campaigns 150 years after the fact from the comfort of your armchair this chair doesn't have arms generalship aside lee was by far the better man no no no if we're going to talk about all right we're getting away from general and we're going to go back to focusing on character lee is going to lose that battle every time if we're gonna talk about the character as human beings grant's gonna come out on top grant oliver howard you know these guys were top-notch character people absolutely so now grant and lee treated their slaves grant kept his and said he not raise his sword to free any slave grant had one slave given to him by his father-in-law that he immediately turned around and freed despite the fact that grant was penniless at the time and could have probably gotten a thousand dollars which would have been life-changing for him if he had sold that slave but he didn't do that he on the other hand freed his he acquired them in marriage and treated them justly that's maybe like a quarter true in the mid 1850s grant did manage about 30 enslaved people at his father-in-law's farm by all accounts he was a terrible slave driver because he was too gentle with them awoke slave driver is still a slave driver i couldn't agree more and grants was briefly a slaveholder himself he owned a man named william jones for about a year before freeing him in march of 1859. yes grant was a slave owner and general lee was of course an abolitionist no he called slavery a moral and political evil he did but he still owned them there are few i believe but what we'll acknowledge as slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country yeah and in that same letter he also says the systematic and progressive efforts of abolitionists to interfere with and change the domestic institutions of the south are truthfully and faithfully expressed the consequences of their plans and purposes are also clearly set forth and they must also be aware that their object is both unlawful and entirely thought to them and can only be accomplished by them through the agency of a civil and the blacks are immeasurably better off here than in africa marvelous socially and physically they're better off as slaves here than free in africa that's his view the painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race how long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by hawaii's and merciful providence if lee believed slavery was an evil he thought it was a necessary one and actions speak louder than words right hiring records show that lee personally owned people until at least 1852 and frequently sold or traded them away at his own convenience even though that meant breaking up their families evidence from his personal letters shows that when lee did free his slaves he didn't do it out of the kindness of his heart but rather because he hated supervising them and didn't want them around when he briefly managed his wife's slaves at their house in arlington he was a notoriously cruel slave master and drove his people hard as late as july 1860 he considered buying even more slaves and rented out slaves as personal servants throughout the entire civil war well again none of this has anything to do with the topic of who's a better general i i really get i'm not saying these conversations shouldn't be had we do need to talk about these kinds of things but if we're judging people on general ship what they did in their private lives as slave owners is irrelevant to them as generals it's not irrelevant to them as human beings it's irrelevant to them as generals i'm not done politically lee consistently supported pro-slavery policies and after the war upheld laws specifically designed to restrict the rights of friedman he also frequently expressed racist views which were certainly very much in keeping with his time but are still a far cry from our popular image of the kindly general yeah and you know who else had such racist racist views abraham lincoln a lot of other people i'm not defending those views because there were people in that time who fought for complete equality in all things who did not see black people as lesser value or as secondary to white people but they were in a s a small minority compared to the majority thought at that time on both sides during his time in mexico he found the people of that country to be primitive in their habits and tastes he referred to native americans as it is yeah and you know what you could find similar quotes from half the generals in the union army too so again i don't see the point he's trying to make here and the only people he seemed to have any affection for at all were predictably government and circumstance have produced changes in the character of people it in all essential qualities they resemble the races from which they are sperm and to no race are we indebted for the virtues and qualifications which constitute a great people than the anglo-saxon your sainted grant was no better did you know that he was a rabid anti-semite in december of 1862 a handful of businessmen some of them jewish were illegally selling true in grants military district so he issued general orders number 11 which expelled all jewish people from the area under his military control the order read the jews as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the treasury department and also department orders are hereby expelled from the department yeah and the verbiage of the order reflects old european stereotypes about jews too so a super bad look and you will not find any argument from me unsurprisingly or perhaps surprisingly the order was met with general public outrage it was lincoln was horrified and immediately rescinded grant's edict and though the general insisted that it was all a big misunderstanding the controversy would haunt him for the rest of his life yeah it wasn't a misunderstanding and he regretted it and he expressed that regret in his in his memoirs i think he was influenced by his father on that one uh his father was there trying to take advantage of his son's command of that department and trying to make a quick buck and was running into competition from the jewish merchants at the time i'm not defending what grant did he was wrong absolutely and that's the point you're going to find moral outrage on both sides of the equation and again has nothing to do with them as generals life especially during his presidential run he issued multiple public apologies was he sincere who is to say i mean he was a politician after all you know johnny here's what i think it really comes down to as far as how we choose to remember these men here's what i think are you ready spit it out here's what i think ulysses s grant was instrumental in bringing about the end of slavery in this country bobby lee tried his very best to keep the damn thing going again not disagreeing with that statement but what does that have to do with who was the better general i i he does not seem to be capable of separating the two when he's making an analysis like this it's the same issues that i had with him on the whole gods and generals thing he just does not seem to be able to get away from his outrage over the confederacy's defense of slavery so much so and i'm not saying you shouldn't be outraged over that it just it colors everything he talks about when it comes to the civil war he can't separate that uh even when talking about generals you got to talk about their performance as generals and if we want to talk about them as people fine but i think that's pretty much all he's going to talk about for the rest so i'm going to wrap it up right there let me know your thoughts um i say i probably agreed with 75 percent of what he said uh in this video i just really wish he hadn't gone down the road of talking about them in terms of morality i really wish he would stick to the topic but i've harped on that enough so let me know your thoughts in the comment section below i'm gonna try to record a couple of videos today so you guys have some more content while i'm on vacation but be watching for some original content and also follow me on instagram because you'll see a lot of pictures coming from our trip to massachusetts and maine from the historic sites there you'll see those a lot sooner than you see the videos show up on the channel thanks for watching

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 87,095

Rating: 4.5939088 out of 5

Keywords: civil war, black history, atun shei films, atun-shei reaction, american history, checkmate lincolnites, american civil war, atun-shei films, checkmate lincolnites reaction, reaction video, military history, atun-shei films civil war, historian reacts, atun shei films reaction, atun shei films checkmate lincolnites, atun-shei films reaction, atun shei, lost cause myth, stonewall jackson, robert e lee, lost cause

Id: Wr7bwcn0IxE

Length: 41min 44sec (2504 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TeddysRevenge]

I agree with him on most things but it’s frustrating to see him continually get upset that the character of the Generals (especially the south) are brought up.

Maybe he does more ancient history where the political and societal aspects are downplayed but in our current political and social climate I think it’s important to present the character of the person along with the military record.

[u/makagulfazel]

He misunderstood the premise of the question due to the title. I would be mildly suspicious he was being disingenuous if this was the first video of his I had watched - due to the annoyance he seemed to exhibit towards the end - but he's praised the command of Grant, Meade and Sherman during other videos.

And if he'd watched like 1-2 mins further, maybe the argument against an agenda would've been more clear.. Shame he didn't

[u/MacaulayDracula]

This is a more basic point, but I thought Mr Vlog's expertise was on medieval England (based on what he said?)? I haven't watched too much of his stuff but I don't really like the whole "reaction video" spiel. I don't think it's right for historians to do a Mark Goldbridge (google him if you wanna know) and do "spontaneous reactions" to well-researched essays. It's just cheap and devalues the discipline.

Billy Yank really doesn't say much that Gary Gallagher hasn't said before but that's not the fucking point - it's about packaging these insights and bringing them to a wider audience. Vlog guy takes the low-hanging fruit to make monetised videos off actually researched stuff.

Bottom line: I just really hate when historians pretend they knew everything about "history as such". The discipline has suffered enough with frauds like VD Hanson.

[u/evan466]

There’s definitely a place for discussions about their characters, and it seems these checkmate Linconite videos probably are that place if the channel is mostly about dispelling lost cause myths.

If he was more familiar with the channel’s focus on that premise of dispelling LC myths, maybe he wouldn’t have made as big a deal out of it. But I can’t disagree with him that purely from the perspective of their performance as military generals, their personal lives are almost entirely irrelevant to the discussion.

I imagine if I had wrote an essay in a history class about the best battle field commanders and spent 30% of it talking about their relationships with their wives I probably would be docked some points because it’s outside the focus of my paper unless I can show that it somehow related to their abilities as a commander.